How to lead remote teams: The Navy SEAL playbook | Chris Fussell | Big Think Edge

I'd like all of us to think about science and its methods and tools: space-time, the nature of human consciousness, artificial intelligence, incredibly realistic humanoid robots, a new technology for gene editing, the battle against climate change, and the future civilization of Mars. This means wherever we're gonna go, our laser highway of laser beams shooting the consciousness of aliens at the speed of light.

What do we get smarter, faster with new Big Think videos daily from the world's most brilliant minds? Welcome, everyone, to the Big Think live webinar. Today's topic is leading remote teams, spanning digital leadership, and collaboration. I'm Peter Hopkins, the president and co-founder of Big Think, and I will be moderating today's discussion.

Our guest today is Chris Fussell. Chris is currently the president of the McChrystal Group, a leadership consulting firm in the DC area. He's also a former Navy SEAL officer, serving in the SEALs for 15 years, and he is the co-author, with Stanley McChrystal, of the New York Times best-selling book "Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World" and its sequel, a Wall Street Journal bestseller, "One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams." Welcome, Chris! Thank you, I appreciate you.

So, for those of you who are watching, if you're new to the Big Think live, today's webinar will last about 45 minutes. We'll start with the discussion with Chris first, followed by audience Q&A. So please, ask your questions in the comments section of whatever platform you're watching on: Facebook, YouTube, Big Think Edge. You can start sending questions right away, and we will get to them in the Q&A portion. Also, at the very end of today's session, we will do an exclusive lesson for our Big Think Edge subscribers. So, if you're a subscriber to Big Think Edge, please stay tuned for that. And if you are not a Big Think Edge subscriber, go to bigthinkedge.com.

Alright, let's dive in. Chris, you have written that there is much we can learn from crises about leadership. Talk to us about what comes out in these dire, desperate moments when people are being tested. What is revealing about the nature of leadership, both good and bad?

Yeah, this is an interesting one because the whole world is going through this together, obviously, which is not the normal sort of crisis mode. Even big events in our lifetimes, the 911s, the financial fallout, nothing compared to this. Every organization that we work with, and when I went through this in the military, when you have crisis on scale, a few things naturally tend to happen. Big traditional bureaucracies and hierarchies, those sorts of models, they have this sort of knock-on effect in their design.

When they go into crisis, because they're designed to handle things very well in a predictable environment, I can get my intelligence teams together, I can get my sales and marketing together, whatever it is. They have great conversations, and it rolls up, and we figure out our month or quarter or year, etc. In times of crisis, a lot of those norms around planning cycles are massively corrupted.

So, as confusion rolls up the bureaucracy, so to speak, power and conversation tends to consolidate up at the very top level. You come to a decision, and that cascades back down. The classic example of this in geopolitics would be the Cuban Missile Crisis. Because there's so much that has been written on it, the world's about to blow up. So what happens here in DC? Where I thought all the great people get together in a very small circle, they spend two weeks negotiating with a similarly small team on the Soviet side, and they prevent the end of the world essentially.

Which is fine; you can consolidate power and then flip it back down, but not much else happens when that's going on. Right? There's not a lot of other history written about those two weeks during US negotiations with Soviets and rightfully so. In today's world, those moments of consolidated power are happening more and more regularly, and then in a crisis like we're in right now with the COVID pandemic, you can see this happening across boundaries and across industries.

That consolidation feels right, feels natural, but in my experience, it's what we experienced in the military, and we've seen in industry, you want to actually look at it the other way. You want to force yourself as a leader, especially when you're in this network-spread, very complex environment that we now find ourselves in, maintain centralized communications but push authorities down into those at the edge of your organization.

But you have to inform them. You have to communicate. We have the platforms right at our fingertips literally now. We can connect around the world in real time, have those conversations, pull more people into them, and then you can be central on down into that front line of your organization. It doesn't happen overnight, but when we faced network threats in the Special Operations community, it took us months, if not years, to learn that behavior.

And we have to very quickly, as it pertains to the globe, get comfortable with this. Because the smartest people in a time of crisis are the ones that are next to it. Whether on the battlefield or in your organization, those are the ones out on the front edge. You have to find a way to inform them and let them make decisions.

Can you set the stage of how the concept of Team of Teams sort of emerged from your experiences on the frontlines in the SEALs and also General McChrystal's work in developing a counterterrorism strategy writ large?

Yeah, sure. Essentially, the Special Operations community looks like any other big business. Right? You've got this big traditional, structured, you've got general officers, your C-suite sitting at the top, nice verticals, geographically distributed responsibilities, distributed inside the verticals, etc. This goes back five or six decades of history. And at the bottom of that org chart, you find these highly specialized small teams—very adaptable, but the SEAL Teams, army specialized units, etc.—and this system worked quite well.

I've got my planning and strategy here, and then down below, I have my small teams. Small teams were built to detach, go out and do an operation, come back in with new information, and feed that back up into the system for the next cycle of decisions. Not unlike a lot of industry models. We grew in a world where that was more segmented.

So, when problems arose that would require the Special Operations attention, it would be isolated in time and space. We didn't have the ability to do what we can do now and connect around the globe at Lightspeed. Something that warranted that level of response would be isolated in time and space, so it was a simple problem. Now, post-2001, we enter an information age battlefield.

We found that as soon as we got to that problem, it had already been connected. It wasn't by us interacting with it; we were forcing it to connect with that global network. So, one team on its own wasn't sufficient. We tried to flood in multiple teams from multiple teams working in those traditional silos, which were insufficient, all because a much less capable adversary was connected at Lightspeed operating as a network, while we were operating as a very effective but traditional top-down model.

The Team of Teams methodology evolved out of that sense of necessity. Networks will tire out big bureaucracy. So, how do we network ourselves in a similar fashion without losing the structure and the strength you get through that scalable hierarchy? We eventually became what we referred to as this Team of Teams model—really a hybrid between those two things.

Supply chain and logistics could remain very structured because they had to be precise and timely, and I needed Gantt charts and planning, etc. Let's layer in a communication structure globally. So that where those teams are in the field learning and in real time, give them a space where they can connect globally, and we can pull that agile nature that exists inside small teams up into this global enterprise with north of 20,000 people spread all around the globe.

It didn't happen overnight, but that's where that teaming at scale concept and methodology started to come from. Talk to us about what that process is like when you're in the middle of a crisis that your planning and resources and the current organizational structure are not suited to, and you're seeing failure after failure as a result of that. How do you, as an organization, as a leader, in real time, begin to calibrate what's going wrong and how to fix it?

And what is that mechanism like, and how do you have to carve out some mental space to allow that learning to happen as the crisis is unfolding? Yeah, it's really interesting. As I was saying before, one of the core beliefs that we experience and we have for industry normal times, especially now, is think about how small teams work.

We've all been part of great small teams in our professional careers most likely. The world I came from was grounded on specialized small teams; they do what you just described all the time. From sports to sales to special operations, wherever it is, you get 20 highly confident people that trust each other and understand the mission. You put them into an unknown environment that's changing constantly, and they very organically learn, adjust, react, learn to just react, etc.

If they can do that faster than the adversary, they win. Right? That's hard to scale. So, one of the core ideas is can you do both in real time? Of course, we've all adapted in a moment when we're with that small, trusted team. At scale, we realized what are the fundamental drivers that allow an organization to do that?

We boiled it down, and this goes back to the origins of this thinking under General McChrystal. We know small teams, when they go out onto the battlefield or into whatever high-stress environment, have this sense of shared consciousness. They have a shared understanding of the data around them that's changing in real time.

It's the blind pass in basketball, right? Everybody's moving down the court. The guard at the front knows we're all reading the same defense. I just know intuitively my teammate is going to be to my back left, and they can hit it every time. Right? That's shared understanding. But that's small numbers seeing the environment through one lens.

Can we scale that up? Was the question. The answer was not sure, but we believed it'll start through more effective, transparent, and inclusive communications. We can't all be looking at the same thing, but we know we now have the ability to connect digitally around the world. That's no longer a barrier; we don't need to be in the same room. So, could we pull tens, hundreds, thousands of people into one common conversation on a cadence that matches the rate of change in the external environment?

Again, this didn't happen with the flick of a switch, but in the answer to that was yes. Stan McChrystal, and this has been spread around the globe, started this process of every 24 hours, seven days a week, for years on end, having a 60 to 90-minute discussion with people in the organization. It wasn't a top-down military-based directive sort of meeting; it was a bottom-up.

Who are those teams that are closest to the edge? I want to hear from you. What are you seeing? What's changing? And said so let's have a discussion about it. What are we learning, and now how do we adjust our thinking and pivot our strategy slightly, perhaps, to your point? So that we can do both at the same time—we can operate, we can learn, we can adjust.

Eventually, those forums, those communication structures that were put in place, had six, seven, eight thousand people a day on one single net just listening to each other, having a conversation through video, through chat rooms, through follow-up correspondence, etc. We became, this is a global real-time learning organization, and this was all done virtually.

In a way, you might even say that the current moment where we're really sent into a virtual workplace actually might unlock opportunities to manage larger organizations better at scale.

Yet, no, it's a super interesting point. There's a strange irony and twist here, but the parallels are striking. Right? So, we've been talking about this internally since this whole thing began. What we faced was we had a traditional structure, centrally located, a few headquarters inside the US, but a very top-down, one-building sort of mentality. Then we would attach teams to go to a problem, not unlike the way a lot of big industries operate, but we're going to fly to Chicago for the sales meeting, then come back to the New York headquarters to report what we found.

We found that there was suddenly a distributed network threat, so we had to try to be everywhere at once. Right? Those teams had to detach from the physical known location, the headquarters, and distribute themselves around the world. So we were forced to become a remote work model, whether we liked it or not.

We didn't think of it like that, but it's the same thing that this COVID pandemic has now done to us. We have to become a remote and digitally connected company where whatever space you might be in, and the knock-on effects of that, well, we learned all these tools and eventually developed this operating framework. The Team of Teams concept. It's our belief that every crisis presents new opportunity on the backside of this.

I think we will be a much more capable workforce broadly because people will understand over two months, four months, six months, however long this goes on. If there's new waves, we will be able to flow in and out of a very traditional top-down workplace and into decentralized remote work environments.

You know, we all sort of get a collective pass on this one because no one really saw it coming to this level, or when we did, it was too late. But the in the fall and spring, in the next crisis like this, this needs to be the wake-up call, and people won't necessarily get the pass next time. So we have to learn fast and adjust even in this new virtual world.

Are there qualities of leadership that are distinguished from the physical world? Are there new traits that leaders need to bring to the table in light of the remote, dispersed nature of the organizations they're trying to lead?

Yeah, no, I think there certainly are. One of the things that's easy to forget is that although it's obvious when you say it out loud, we no longer have the hallway. Right? We no longer have the chatter before and after the meeting. We no longer have the coffee pot in the kitchen. It's easy, as you get more senior in an organization, to underestimate or undervalue how much of work actually happens in those interactions.

Right? So if you and I run the company, we sit through the meeting, and we look at the PowerPoint deck, and we make some declarative statements.

Then in most organizations that I've been part of or worked with, the meeting ends, and people walk out into the hallway into their little sub-networks and say, "What exactly were they trying to get out there? Let me clarify this nuance." You know him better. "What did he mean by this?"

When we end a meeting, that doesn't happen. Or, if it does happen—and we see this all the time now over the last six weeks—people get bombarded, and they have these cascading meetings after meeting after meeting. A lot of people have spoken with this: "Why am I busier now at home than I was when we were in the office?"

It's because you lose that physical nuance. Right? That's where you get all that cultural intuition sort of bubbles up there. So, yeah, leaders need to recognize that and present themselves differently in these sorts of forums. One of the pieces of advice we've been giving regularly is, don't just take your Outlook calendar, put it into Zoom or Microsoft Teams or whatever your platform is, and think we're good. Right?

You're not good. You have to adjust your behavior. You have to communicate more regularly. You have to pull in more people. So, you have to create some sort of larger virtual but video forums. You can do that with dozens of people or hundreds of people; it depends on your organization.

When you go into that environment, lots of leaders would say, "Well, I kind of do that every quarter anyway." Yeah, but don't think of this as a video town hall that you did every quarter. This is maybe three times a week, and your best leader into that environment.

Bring the leader that you are when it's six of your trusted folks around the table. Bring that person into that virtual environment with 200, or 400, or a thousand of your people twice a week, and you will be able to cut through those barriers. You can recreate that hallway cultural environment in a virtual space.

And I say that because that's what we lived. That's the only tool we had. We lived in that environment 24/7 for years on end, and you forgot whether you were physically together or not. I had some really good friends from those experiences that we would go three years without ever being in the same room, and you've lost that sense.

That was the last time we were actually physically in the same space; it just didn't matter anymore. How are you able to build rapport in the absence of being physically present? I mean, and what does culture look like if it's not being set in the tone and the atmosphere that's being set in the physical office?

How did you think about those challenges?

Yeah, it has to start with leaders, and you absolutely don't want to do that. One of the things that this sort of communication does to us is, and it's just a knock-on of how we've leveraged it traditionally for the last 15 or 20 years, is it puts us in a little more—this camera, so it's a little more static. I'm looking at someone; I'm looking at a little dot on my iPad. There's a slide deck next to me, so I feel like, you know, am I centered? Am I talking about—am I reading the bullet points?

I use it in a much more formal manner, and so that behavior can easily roll in now and become the new norm, and that's where leaders have to recognize, "Okay, how do I pull that hallway culture in here?" So, the advice we give is, "Look for moments to be honest and transparent. Look for moments to be human. Look for moments to pull others into the discussion."

So, it really is—it's incumbent. It starts with the senior folks to try to inject moments of honesty, humility, empathy—just basically humanity into these virtual spaces, and the payoff will come. Right? And that can be as simple as recognizing you're speaking with, rather than just saying, "Okay, let's go to marketing for an update." Go to Sarah in marketing, thank her for the report she sent yesterday.

Say, "Everybody, if you haven't seen it, Sarah, could you hang in the chat room because I thought it was really good?" Especially that second paragraph on X. "Thanks for all you did, you and your team." "Are they in Cabo? Hey, how are the kids?" "By the way, you’ve got to—they're driving me crazy at home."

You know, those little moments—even if it’s three people on the line—others will realize, "Wow, that's still a human-to-human conversation."

We do this inside our group all the time using chat rooms on the side during larger video forums so that there could be side dialogues going on, people having fun with each other, posting memes, whatever it takes to introduce a little bit of humor and humanity and fun into the way you communicate.

Because that's not the norm for most organizations and how they’ve leveraged video conferencing. They tend to wait until the hallway to do that, but with that gone, where are you gonna find that new opportunity? And it has to start with, really, what's your advice for those who are being led?

You know it’s been said, but if you want to advance in an organization, you need to make use of the elevator moments, the hallway moments. In the absence of those, how do you establish yourself? How do you contribute? How do you find those opportunities for collision and intersection?

Yeah, two thoughts on that. One, and we try to encourage our own team, that ranges from boomers to millennials, to the larger organization that we work with: one, keep in mind this is also a phone. Right? You can actually pick this up and just talk to people. Right?

So, don't wait for single anchor points inside the communication structures being put in place by your leadership. You don't have the hallway connection anymore. So, don't be afraid to just pick up the phone and call people just to check in for two to three minutes. "How are things going? You look tired this morning. Anything I can help with?" Or just, "Great to see your face this morning on the catch-up."

Etcetera. Just hearing other people's voices. Building in, you know, mid or lower level leaders, team leaders, etc. in organizations finding ways to be relevant to those that look up to them as their manager in a larger organization. Video happy hours on a Friday, quick catch-ups over the weekend.

The technology’s right at our fingertips. Be creative in how you leverage it. And then, for those individual contributors, again, this is much easier when the tone is set by leaders at the top that they're looking for that bottom-up conversation but not being afraid to say, "Hey, I see what we're talking about in these, you know, these three times a week when we're updating. I understand the changes in the Chicago market are of key importance. If I can take three or four minutes tomorrow, I'd happily give a rundown of some client discussions we've had over this week."

Moments like that to sort of enter into those conversations can be really powerful. And then, in reverse, leaders especially setting that tone and not just talking to the head of that office but going down—"Hey, who was the analyst on that? Oh, that was Mike and Terry did that. Can they pop on? I just love to hear their perspective, even if it’s out of the blue."

Pull them on the spot. Thank them for their work. You will learn something, and they will learn, "Wow, I can actually inject myself into this and still be a known actor in this company."

The reality was for us in the military, this was the most powerful tool towards creating a meritocratic system that we'd ever found. Right? Because we learned at every level, it was much easier, rather than just talking to, you know, Chris, the senior officer at some outpost, for the senior leadership to say, "Yeah, Chris, great to see you. Who was the intel person on that?”

That was so-and-so over here. They hop on a camera, it's some younger civilian analyst perhaps attached to that normally would never be heard from in the traditional bureaucratic layering. Now on camera, talking to 6,000 people about what she's an expert in, in the world—suddenly you have thousands of people saying, "Oh, that's where all that brilliant stuff comes from. I'm going to remember her name. If I ever put together a team that needs that skill, I'm going to call her."

Now we're going to move on to audience questions. The first one that has come up, Chris, is what is the most effective visualization practice or technique you could recommend? I know that has come into play in SEALs and in general leadership. Does visualization factor into your thinking at all?

Yeah, could answer a few ways. Visualization of tactical operations has been something that's been thought of deeply over the last few years inside that community. There's some overlay here with professional sports, etc. Connection between subconscious cognitive thinking and your actions.

One of the core tenets of training so hard in the Special Operations community is you are trying to buy down as much or you're trying to put as much into muscle memory space as possible. Because you know science has proven for years that when you get into moments of panic crisis, you know, fight-or-flight mode, people in those communities will go into fight mode.

You want as much of their physical action to be immediately reactive, low cognitive load space. Right? So, you train really, really hard, and when there's a problem—let's say you're skydiving at night, and you have some sort of malfunction—you don't want that operator to have to think through, "I'm gonna do this, this, this, this."

That's why you trained too many times; it's such deep repetition so that they're really not thinking in the moment. They're just solving the problem as you do that through muscle memory. It opens up space to think through at a higher level, "What am I going to do once this is cleared? Once I'm safe again, how am I going to reconnect with my teammates?, etc."

So, over the last probably 10 to 15 years, pivoting that into the use of VR technology and visualization—even in when you can't go out and train in the field—how else can we get that cognitive load down and put into muscle memory as many of those things that are that we can so that we buy the white space for the operator in moments of crisis?

I think it's usually important in that environment. Another question from the audience: this is from somebody who says they are managing a remote team right now, and their concern is smothering their colleagues. How did it help not to succumb to the insecurities that, by virtue of not seeing and being there all the time, you need to check in, you need to assert yourself, you need to be on email all the time?

How do you think about the trade-off between wanting to know what's going on and being sort of micromanaged from afar?

Yeah, so in the military, we called that the thousand-mile screwdriver. Right? Because you could—wherever you were, there could be somebody with, you know, back at headquarters with a screwdriver that would always kind of twist to that you, so you don't want to do that. Right? It's caustic, and it can slow things down as you're trying to speed things up.

So, a few things to think about. One, think about how you're communicating. And by that, I mean very, very practically what other communication forums we're using. Do we have a three times a week Zoom meeting? We're all hopping on. And by all, how many? Who is in there? Pull as many people as you can in that environment.

And then what are we covering? So, you want to be able to create an environment where you're giving your team the opportunity to talk and connect, whether it's through video or in the side chat rooms, etc. That way, everybody gets that sense of shared consciousness of what's happening in the field.

As that refines itself, you'll find as a leader, you know, more and more you know enough during those windows. If you’re not getting enough, continue to tweak the agenda, the approach, the periodicity, who's in there, etc.

So that during the gaps between, you find much smaller need to follow up with individual teammates and say “Where are we on the Smith deal?” or “On project X?” or whatever the case may be. It'll never be perfect, right? Because we're in a pretty complex change environment right now.

But you'll be much closer. And I always encourage leaders, every time you feel yourself going down this road, which is very natural, take note of it, and say, "Literally, I joined jotted down and started reviewing those. What are the types of things I'm asking my team about too regularly where I feel like I might be smothering them? Should we pull those into a more common conversation, and would that fly by down my need for individual follow-up?"

As a knock-on, would they start learning from each other and we collectively get better about these sorts of things? And the other benefit of that is teams start to see how you lead, how you think. Right?

So, if I have a one-off conversation with my boss, and she asks me about the Smith project, that's one thing. If collectively we all know she's really interested in these types of deals, then we're starting to get inside her head more. Right?

So pulling those into a more public and transparent space can be helpful. And then another audience question is sort of what are the steps of evolving into a Team of Teams?

You know, going from a hierarchical top-down structure to a more decentralized structure, are there sort of team milestones or things that a leader or an organization should have in mind as they segue into this new approach?

Sure, the first one is it's not an overnight change. Step one is really deeply analyzing your environment. And I don't mean that by senior leader and chief strategy officer getting together and figuring everything out and then rolling out a plan.

In fact, in the world I grew up in, the exact ops that happened were how this started to evolve—was our senior leadership being very transparent and honest, and before we had the wherewithal to start creating these massive communication structures, etc., they started spending time in conversation with those that were at the front edge of our organization.

Literally on the front line, in many cases, the first time I remember having this discussion, I was part of a four-person element sitting on some remote outpost in the middle of nowhere, sort of on the edge of the fight. Our senior general officer and one or two others showed up, and we had a discussion at a flip-chart about what we were seeing.

They were saying very honestly this was early in our transition: "Here’s how we're structured.” "I've been in this business for 25–30 years now. We're good at doing X, right? Detaching from the ship and going out and doing stuff and coming back. We think we're fighting something that looks different. It's some sort of network sort of thing. We’re not exactly sure; we're wrestling with how this system, as it's built, gets ahead of this system over here. We know where we have more capability, more resourcing, etc., but it's still out-maneuvering us."

We had an hour and a half long, just open-ended discussion, and in hindsight, I realized they were doing that all over the world. They were getting an understanding from those on the ground and developing a more core thesis. So, as they started to roll out the change, we all saw ourselves in that.

Now, with digital communication, it's the nature of business. Now leaders can do that very quickly. Go around, start talking with your people: "What's working? What isn't? What are you feeling, seeing?"

Send pulse surveys. There are lots of stuff you can do in that space and then talk about it—come back and say, “Okay, we’ve had a bunch of discussions; here’s what we’re learning.” One of the real realities is we need to communicate with more transparency and more inclusion about certain things so that you on the edge that we were just talking about this have the insights and the empowerment to move faster.

So, we're gonna start tweaking a little bit of our communications and decision-making structure towards a network sort of model, and then you start to layer and change. You start to look for quick wins, and you can advertise those internally, and pretty soon before you know it, it gets a life of its own.

People realize, "The more honest and transparent I am in these communication forms, the faster I can move at the edge, the better we are as an organization."

Yeah, it's interesting that the culture is becoming visualized because of communication being so ubiquitous, instantaneous, and ongoing.

Yeah, and one of the upsides to this is it's in our DNA. Our species likes being in trust-based small tribal units. Right? It's macro history dating back thousands of years. We now have the technology to create that feeling of tribal cohesion and trust and relationship-based organization at a massive scale if we leverage technology effectively.

One of, again, what good can come from a crisis: you brought it up earlier. We're in this situation whether we like it or not. Leaders now have the imperative and the advantage. They can leverage this to create that at scale, and when we come out the backside of this, don’t lose it. Retain that we figured out how to create an interconnected, trust-based system through digital platforms at a massive scale.

So, let's hold on to that coming out of this. Here's another question from the audience sort of keying off Americans' fascination with SEALs and sort of, you know, almost superhuman attributes ascribed to them. The questioner wants to know what specifically from your SEAL experiences have influenced your approach to business?

Are there any psychological or resilience exercises that you're using as an individual now during this, that you've drawn from your SEAL experience? The Hollywood version isn't always exactly right, but yeah, I mean the SEAL community, as well as other special operation communities, we have the advantage of a long history.

Right? We’ve been at this for generations figuring how to select people into these communities, and if you're selecting really for one thing, there’s a baseline of physical attribute that has to be there, but it's not professional sports caliber. More than anything, you are looking for a grittiness and a refusal to quit.

Right? Because you want a teaming-oriented personality, and so you very—especially in SEAL Teams—you very deliberately put people into situations where even if you are that superhuman Division One athlete, that superstar, you just can't solve it by yourself.

You need teammates to come, and you’re in that environment for months and months on end, and if you're caustic, if you're not a team player, eventually the most superhuman on the planet will fall out. Right? So you end up with these sort of gritty, focused, team-oriented folks that come through to the other side.

At the core of that, that's the trick to Special Operations: it is more than the sum of its parts, and that's been core to the thesis going back as long as those units have existed. And yet, to the second part of that question, certainly, I think there are some interesting writings lately on how this moment is affecting veteran communities versus others.

In some ways, you know, military deployments are all about having your basic day-to-day freedoms taken away from you, and you surrender to that, right? So you're used to going from your warm, comfortable bed with your fan on only 48 hours later to being in the middle of some combat zone.

You can’t leave a certain perimeter, and it's very dangerous, and your life is disrupted massively in an instant. On the other side, your families are dealing with that same disruption. So there's a quicker pivot.

To the question, one of the key factors is acceptance of this is a current reality. There is no point in allowing it to frustrate you. Recognizing that, yes, I wish things were different, but let's compartmentalize that because we're not going to change it.

Let's do what we can to support our friends, our family, our local community, our organization, and let's play our part as those in a position to drive a solution on the backside of this. Do their work, right? So, I think, you know, that there was in the military environment, certainly frustrating moments, operations, etc., overseas where you could say, "This whole thing is a total mess."

Or you could say, "I'm gonna play the part I can right now with me and my team. We're gonna accomplish our part of the mission, and we will feed up what we can to impact the broader strategy."

I think it’s important for that. It’s an interesting point; not losing sight of—or not letting a general sense of the trajectory of things get in the way of the immediate tasks at hand.

I think that’s a really great piece of advice that everyone could apply at various aspects of their life at this moment. Another audience question I think is really relevant and important for you to comment on is: have you identified or seen instances, whether they're clients of the McChrystal Group, whether they're government organizations or others, whose response to the crisis and how they've evolved as an organization in crisis reflects the best practices that you're trying to impart?

Are there any case studies yet that you've identified that seem to be doing this right? Sure, yeah. I mean, we’ve been at this for about a decade now, and so yeah, we've got reams of case studies obviously up on our consulting practice website for those that are interested.

But the most encouraging and interesting to me over the last two months has been teams that we worked with—leadership teams who work with organizations that we've worked with over the last five or six years—who have said we tend not to stay inside an organization for ten years straight.

I will have reached out to us recently after having wrapped up our focused work maybe two years ago and saying, "The work you did got us through the first two months of this. I don't know how we would have survived if we didn't have this distributed network-based mentality, communication structures in place, that we can quickly pivot toward and amplify speed up, etc."

We've seen some organizations in places like consumer goods, etc., that we've worked with historically move very smoothly—as smoothly as can be possible—through this crisis. We had some great discussions with them about how this methodology has been helpful.

And then even inside of our own group, obviously, we're smaller, about a hundred folks, but we're spread around the world, and it's a pretty complex little business. We have had just lived into our own DNA and took what was normally a five to seven-day cadence.

We were very disciplined about how we communicate or share information, and recognizing the environment around us is going to get out of control very quickly. So going back over a month, we pivoted to a seven-day cadence: I've got quick sync with our whole team seven days a week.

We've now backed that off to six days a week just reading the market and the environment around us. But that daily cadence—well, see how long it lasts—allowed us to very quickly normalize and keep everyone informed and deal with the internal change and how we’re going to go into the market.

So I think it’s a model that can speed up, speed down, get larger, get smaller, depending on the environment. That's the idea—that's what a teaming mentality at scale. The dissemination of information and transparency is so much at the core of this concept.

Could you speak a little bit about the tension between putting the rosy spin, or perhaps looking at a situation from its most favorable vantage point, let's put it, and just, you know, the cold hard truth, unspun, unvarnished?

Is there a role for being a cheerleader in all of this, and how do you balance that against the need to get raw data out there and to have it unbiased as much as possible?

Yeah, that's a great question; it's a really important point. There's a saying in the service: you know, if things are going bad, it's the people on the front line that are getting shot at. Right? So cheerleading won't always work. Right? They're close to the problem, so be thoughtful in how you're trying to describe that or capture it because they’ll see through the fluff very quickly.

That said, of course, there's a role for the way you capture that and describe it: near-term reality and long-term optimism about who you are as a team and how you're going to get through this.

I think that's an important role for leaders to play. One of the keys there is setting a cadence on how you communicate. By that, I mean just, what’s that rhythm? Is its daily and weekly, etc.?

I've always thought it critical that it's just a step faster than what you think is the key rate of change in the environment around you. Whether that's daily or weekly, etc., it depends on the world you're in. I would say it's much more aggressive than it probably was six weeks ago.

If you set it to that pace, then leaders can't come in there as the most informed person in the organization. In a traditional bureaucracy, you can do that. You can get together and do your quarterly town hall, and everybody thinks you're brilliant, and they don't know that you've just spent five days drawing your staff to give you all that information.

You say you know everything. Right? Set it on a cadence where you have to walk in there as just a raw and honest leader and say, "Okay, Peter, what's going on in the New York market? I'm tracking this, but it seems like two or three other things are going on. Talk to us."

Now you have the stage, and you want your—the next five things you say might have no idea what's coming out of your mouth. Everybody else on the net can see that, and they're seeing, "Wow, Chris is being an honest, vulnerable leader. He's putting Peter in the driver's seat right now. He's acknowledging what he doesn't know, some of it he might not like to hear, and they're going to dialogue on it."

Then I'm gonna reach out to others, maybe junior people on your team, people from the Milwaukee office, we’ll have an honest conversation. Right? If I slow it down to the point where you've given me all that in a PowerPoint deck and email, and I walk in and say, "Here’s what’s happening in New York and Milwaukee," I might feel good like I look like the all-knowing leader, but we're going way too slow.

Finding that balance and leaders forcing themselves to be uncomfortable is a critical part of it. Now we're coming out on the last audience question as we're running short on time, this one asks you to put back your SEAL hat on, but I think you can also speak to it from the vantage point of being a sort of organizational expert.

This person asks, in the military, I'm sure you had to develop mechanisms for living where you work and working where you live when deployed. I do have advice for people on how to cope with working from home when work is intense and adrenaline keeps you up all night.

How do we manage having all of our lives play out in such relatively now smaller and confined spaces, you know, within the context of trying to be a team member now in all of these virtual ways?

Yeah, it’s a great question, and it’s 90% similar to be honest. I mean, take out the—the threat of the environment—the big Ted present difference, maybe it’s some undervalue, probably, is I never had my kids on deployment, so that's an unpredictable variable that we're all figuring out—those of us that have kids that are homeschooling right now.

But aside from that, I think the—we've advised a lot of leaders, like think about what you're— I like to think of it as your own personal cocktail. What is the mix of things that you put together to keep you sane and on the rails?

Most of my experience, the majority of high-performance leaders and organizations in whatever industry, they’ve got some interesting wiring. Right? There a little bit manic, a little bit stressed, very alpha in their approach, and there are certain things that keep that on the rails.

Right? It's a mix of, for me, it’s a mix of exercise, right amount of sleep, and I know plus or minus 30 minutes what keeps me. If I, my best diet, time of my family, alone time, somewhere in that sort of five-part mix. I know what the right blend is.

Right? And so, like everyone else here, my gym closed down six weeks ago, right? So I had to immediately pivot and say, "Aha, I know I need that physical outlet; what's that going to look like in a much more constrained space?"

There’s lots of ways to get there; it’s not going to be the perfect treadmill of my favorite one in the gym, but I’ll figure that out. Right? I’ll get my heart rate up, and I'll expend some energy and family time, personal time, etc.

I would recommend to people to figure out what that looked like when you're at your peak performance in normal times, and then how do I map it over into this more constrained space?

The first thing that any SEAL unit would do—and this is probably playing into the Hollywood narrative—but any output you’ve got sent to say, "Hey, go find this." You know, “Plot a dirt in the middle of nowhere and create an outpost.” The first thing it showed up was the gym equipment. Right?

And maybe that was just a TRX and kettlebell. Right? But guys knew if we go out there, we're gonna kill each other if we don’t have a way to expend some energy. Right?

So that’s—we're gonna get our comms set up, we're going to get a little gym set up, and then we’ll bring in some food and the other stuff. Five days later, we'll work about worried about where we're sleeping. Right?

Because they knew that's the cocktail to make this unit effective. So I would advise people to start thinking about what was it then, and how do I map it over to today?

No, it’s good advice. I think it's so easy to forget the essentials when they're taken out of context. Well, Chris, thank you so much for making time and sharing your incredibly perspective.

This wraps up our public portion of the webinar for our Facebook and YouTube viewers. If you enjoyed the webinar, please join us next Tuesday at noon for a conversation with leadership consultant and recruiting guru, James Citron.

He’s been responsible for placing some of the top executives in the world at the helms of major corporations, and during this time where so much is uncertain about the labor market, Jim's perspective on how to succeed and thrive in this uncertain time will be really interesting.

So, I encourage you to join us for that on Tuesday, and for our Big Think Edge subscribers, in just a couple moments, we'll dive into an exclusive lesson with Chris, and to everyone else thank you again for tuning in.
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Okay, Chris, we are back for our subscriber exclusive, and for this, we want to talk about a virtual meeting technology, specifically sound. I'm a little embarrassed, actually, because in the prep for this session, we were trying out a fancy new system that lets us put in all sorts of interstitials, and of course on Chris's end there wasn’t...